The Shawshank Redemption (Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman) 1/2
It's hard to believe that the same actor/director who would eventually give the world the poignant and provocative film Dead Man Walking, was associated (as an actor) with a film that is so dominantly pro-prisoner in its approach and treatment of the subject of convicted criminals.
Tim Robbins isn't to blame for the mis-steps in The Shawshank Redemption though. That would be kind of like blaming a bland-tasting chicken soup on one noodle. The problem goes right to the broth itself, the very essence of the film's ideas, that makes it miss the mark. For example, in Robbins's Dead Man Walking, there is a careful and considered view of every side of a criminal act (from the point of view of the prisoner and the prisoner's family, to the victim and the victim's family). Shawshank, however, makes many of the inmates appear to be the protagonists and depicts the warden and the guards as either heinous vilains or as incompetent dupes. It makes for some very offputting scenes right from the get-go at Shawshank penitentiary -- attempting to make the convicts the ones we should be rooting for. As the murdering lifer Red (Morgan Freeman) puts it, "They send you here for life, that's exactly what they take." Here is the film's basic flaw in a nutshell. In real life, I'd hate to see any family member of a victim hear this kind of lament (duh, you killed someone). The prisoners are sentenced to life terms, yet throughout the movie some of the characters don't even want to leave because their entire lives now consist of the Shawshank prison.
And what difficult lives they lead! Furnished libraries, enough introspective time to fashion rows upon rows of wood carvings, access to the financial records of guards and the warden... hard time indeed.
These semi-disturbing cinematic points of view are certainly at the discretion and prerogative of the filmmakers, and they might even be forgivable if it weren't for the conclusion of the movie, which includes a sequence that mirrors Clint Eastwood's Escape from Alcatraz down to the letter. This isn't homage -- it's fromage.
If I'm making the Shawshank Redemption seem like a chore to watch, it isn't. It may be a tad long, but it's never unbearable. The performances are for the most part solid, and there is a particularly compelling scene featuring James Whitmore as the "institutionalized" inmate Brooks Hatlen, an old man who struggles with life on the outside after he has paid his debt to society in full.
The movie was nominated for a slew of Oscars (it didn't win any to the best of my knowledge), and in critics' circles or among movie buffs, it's considered by many to be a classic, but in my opinion the movie never really proves anything -- except that if you sneak opera music into any picture or manage to reduce all of the characters down to "good guy or bad guy" terms, people are bound to cheer for it. It may have been printed in the opening credits, or perhaps it was listed in the closing credits, but I must confess I forgot to check what planet Shawshank was actually located on.
